Informetric Studies
Author:	K.G. Sudhier
Publisher:	B.R. Publishing Corporation
Edition:	Ist Edition
Place:	Delhi
Year:	2017
Indian Price:	Rs. 1,250
ISBN:	9789386223388
Reviewed by:	Dr. Muzamil Mushtaq
Assistant Professor, Department of Library and Information Science, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India
Email id:naikoomuzamil@gmail.com

Informetrics is one of the buzz words in the existing quantitative and qualitative measurement techniques of information, in which the behaviour and use of all forms of information are being studied. It investigates the empirical regularities and customaries of the activities of information process and attempts to develop mathematical and statistical models and theories to better understand the behaviour and pattern of manifestations in the flow of information. Generally, the informetrics include bibliometrics and its laws, scientometrics, citation analysis and its different measures, scientific and research indicators, webometrics and cybermetrics, information growth, ageing and obsolescence, usage of different information resources and similar other metrics used to assess the quantum and flow of scholarly information and knowledge.

The informetrics examines the users and usage of information (users and their information seeking behaviour, usage of library resources and services), information system (retrieval evaluation, usability research and quality of information), information itself (pattern and flow of information). The investigations and assessments in informetrics research helps in the development of policies, resource selection in libraries, measurement and the impact of scholarly work, patterns of system contents, and system design and evaluation in information retrieval and storage systems and many more related applications.

The contents of the book are strewn into 10 chapters which deal with different aspects of measurement techniques and indicators for assessing the research output and its impact in the light of informetrics and its related metrics used in library and information science. The details of the chapters may be summarised as follows:

The first chapter deals with the evolution of metric studies. It discusses the introduction of informetrics and its important areas like citations and co-citation analysis, document and co-word analysis, resource utilisation, growth and obsolescence and science indicators and policy development. The chapter elucidates the difference between the three closely related metric terms – bibliometrics, scientometrics, informetrics – and the new terms including webometrics and altmetrics in detail.

The second chapter deals with informetrics. It describes the evolution of the concept of informetrics along with the milestones in its evolution from 1896 to 2016 and the use of informetrics, application of bibliometrics, subfields of informetrics, informetrics laws, informetric models, informetric software and tools. The three basic and most popular laws in informetrics are also discussed, namely Bradford's law of scattering, Lotka's law of scientific productivity and Zipf's law of word frequency along with some empirical laws like Sengupta's law of bibliometrics, Garfield law of concentration, Goffman's epidemic theory, Price's square root law of scientific productivity.

The third chapter describes the concept of citation analysis in detail. It deals with the difference between citations and references, citations and citer's motivations, objections to the use of citations, application of citation analysis and the major areas of study of citation analysis. It discusses the emergence of databases other than Science Citation Index, citation indexes and importance of citation studies. The chapter also discusses the citations in the physics doctoral dissertations of Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.

The fourth chapter of the book deals with the authorship studies. It tries to determine the collaborative research trends in physics literature cited by the physicists of IISc in their doctoral dissertations. Therefore, techniques of authorship pattern in physics journals and books and their collaboration have been discussed.

The fifth chapter of the book deals with ageing and obsolescence studies. Along with the introduction of ageing and obsolescence, the half-life, cited half-life, citing half-life, price index and so on have been discussed. The chronological distribution as well as the currency and obsolescence of journals and cited books have been presented with the help of the statistical and mathematical representations.

The sixth chapter discusses the ranking of journals. It provides a list of top-ranked journals, including ranked list of Indian journals, analyses journals used by the research scholars of IISc. The analysis has been made for the coverage of Indian S&T journals in SCI/Journal Citation Report, geographical distribution of journals, language-wise distribution, frequency and publishers of journals cited.

The seventh chapter of the book describes the concept and importance of core books. It describes book bibliometrics, ranking of books, publishers of books, places of publication of books and so on.

The eighth chapter deals with the theoretical as well as the applications of Bradford's law of scattering. The law has been applied to the citation data of IISc theses along with Leimkuhler model and verbal and graphical formulations.

The ninth chapter deals with the introduction and application of Lotka's law of scientific productivity. The law has been discussed with the support of statistical tests like Chi-square and K–S tests along with the suitable graphical representations.

The last chapter of the book describes the new trends in informetrics and altmetrics. The chapter offers a broader overview of the new trends in informetric studies and the databases that are useful for carrying out bibliographic searches beyond the traditional databases. Analysis of full text, informetrics on the World Wide Web, application of informetrics in research evaluation, common informetric indicators, iMetrics, author-level and article-level measurements, h-index and h-type indices and so on have been portrayed nicely and in great detail. The new platforms for evaluating scholarly communication and the challenges ahead for informetrics have also been dealt with to provide an illustrative picture of the future metrics and indicators of research assessment.

The current book provides an insight into the world of metrics in the field of library and information science, with an intricate discussion on informetrics and its allied metrics. It presents the universe of citations and their patterns along with the description of new and nascent areas used for evaluating and quantifying the scholarly ideas. Although the book is compiled from the Ph.D. thesis, it is crafted in such a manner that it can serve as an authoritative source of information for the researchers interested in the field of metrics and indicators of assessing the research works. It is well-documented and researched with each metric method augmented and supported by proper statistical and mathematical formulations.

The book is expected to serve as a useful asset for libraries to learn all the aspects of quantitative and qualitative measurement of information.

Book Review